Gnatcatchers Get Landfill as New Home : Wildlife: Supervisors approve $3.4-million replacement habitat. Environmentalists are skeptical.

Orange County supervisors on Tuesday approved a $3.4-million replacement home for the California gnatcatcher to be created atop the now-closed Coyote Canyon Landfill near Irvine, although environmentalists are skeptical the plan will work.

The county will provide portions of the 300-acre landfill off Newport Coast Drive to be used as an ecological preserve, and the Transportation Corridor Agencies will provide the funding under the cooperative venture approved by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

The plan is designed to make a new home for the small songbird that has been declared a threatened species by the federal government. Up to 30 pairs of gnatcatchers are expected to be displaced by construction of the San Joaquin Hills Toll Road, which environmentalists say will destroy much of the bird’s current habitat.

The TCA, a publicly and privately funded agency that is overseeing development of the controversial South County toll road, will pay the costs of constructing the 100-acre grassy habitat atop the landfill and maintaining it in the future.

“I think we really increase the opportunity for (gnatcatchers) to live,” said Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, whose district includes the landfill site. “It’s just a matter of location.”

Laura Coley Eisenberg, the TCA’s senior environmental analyst for the corridor project, conceded that such a habitat has never been created on top of a landfill.

“But there isn’t any evidence to say that it can’t be done, either,” she said.

Moreover, Coley Eisenberg said, the terms of TCA’s agreement with the federal government call for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to maintain “final say over whether it’s successful or not.”

If the habitat is not immediately successful, the TCA must keep trying until it gets it right, Coley Eisenberg said.

“TCA has every confidence . . . we will design a plan that will be successful,” she said.

In its agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the TCA pledged to provide replacement habitat for the gnatcatcher. But environmentalists who have opposed the toll road take issue with the concept of creating a new home for gnatcatchers on top of a covered landfill. The Coyote Canyon landfill contains 36 million tons of garbage and was closed in 1990 after it reached capacity. It is capped with layers of soil, clay and fiber.

“The re-creation that the TCA proposes is really nothing more than wishful thinking,” said Michael Fitts, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There’s no empirical evidence or track record on which one could conclude that this would work at all, much less provide viable habitat for any of the dozens of rare plants and animals that depend on natural, healthy stands of coastal sage scrub for their survival.”

The NRDC and the National Audubon Society in June formally advised the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of the Interior of their intent to file a lawsuit challenging the legality of creating the replacement habitat as a mitigation measure for toll road construction, Fitts said. The suit has not yet been filed, he added.

However, a federal court restraining order last week temporarily banned the TCA from grading along the toll road corridor because of environmental concerns.

The grading ban could increase the agency’s costs in the project because the TCA had intended to provide topsoil graded from the corridor to create the landfill habitat, the supervisors were told in a report Tuesday.

The restraining order came in a lawsuit by the NRDC against the TCA, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration that challenged the adequacy of the environmental impact statement for the toll road construction.

A hearing will be held Tuesday in federal court in Santa Ana to determine whether a further injunction should be ordered until the merits of the case can be heard. The TCA’s environmental studies have already been upheld in a similar NRDC challenge in state court.